A Day of Sunsets is an open Facebook group created by my friend Glenn Blakeslee where members post their local sunset once a month. What ends up happening is a beautiful reminder of our global community. No significant photography skill or equipment is required, so anyone can participate. Even if you have a cloudy day, obscured horizon and crummy phone camera (like me), as long as the sun is setting and you took it, it’s all good. It doesn’t take much time and the pay-off is you get to look at pretty pictures of sunsets. Unless of course you think nature is lame.

I asked Glenn how this came to be, how it’s gone so far and where he sees it going.

For the past few years I’ve taken sunset pictures and posted them on Facebook, mostly for the ego stoke. If the photo is of the sky -sunsets, clouds, the moon or Milky Way- people always ohh and ahh.

A friend suggested that she take one of the sunrise from her home on the East Coast, and then we’d have sunrise and sunset, east and west, for a single day. I’m more than a little obsessed with time and hidden processes, so to expand that to an international search for sunsets seemed like a natural. The idea still took a little while to percolate.

The group had its first Day of Sunsets last month, on Saturday, October 22.

The first set was pretty amazing, and a little ego-shattering. I was humming along in my own universe, thinking I was the only one who paid attention to certain things, only to discover that the love of sunsets was nearly universal. Somehow they strike a chord somewhere. Now I’m a small fish in a big pond. Some of the shots that rolled in… I ran out of adjectives.

The second one is coming up this Saturday, November 19. So now’s the time to join before it becomes a humongous internet sensation.

Once the dataset has grown, there are a lot of neat things that we can do for archiving and display. Imagine a complete day of sunsets pinned to a longitude and latitude grid, and being able to browse it… talk about hidden processes!

Glenn wants to maintain the group’s original concept to capture a single day of sunsets. But for those that want more, he also set up Sunsets Unlimited, where members can post and view pictures to their heart’s content.